Replicas (2018)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2018
	Director: Jeffrey Nachmanoff
	Actors: Keanu Reeves (Speed, The Matrix 1-3, John Wick 1-3), Alice Eve (Star Trek Into Darkness), Thomas Middleditch (Godzilla: King of the Monsters)
	Country: USA, CN, GB
	Genre: Thriller, SF
	Conditions of visioning: 08.07.2019, in-flight entertainment, 10" tablet screen.
Synopsis: Researcher William Foster (Reeves) is at the verge of transferring the consciousness of freshly deceased soldiers into robotic bodies. When his family dies in a car crash... well you can guess the rest.
Review: More than 20 years after Point Break, Speed and The Matrix, the latter still has the most influence on Keanu Reeves' acting career as he still is often caster for futuristic thrillers. Or he just is a good actor well fitted for those roles. In Replicas he doesn't do any Kung Fu, he doesn't fight at all in fact so we get to see him as a brilliant man driven to succeed. There are several things over the top and/or that doesn't make sense in this movie, like when he alone survives without a scratch the car crash that kills everybody else, that he so insists on re-creating his family all at the same time and that he tries to hide it from everybody. Also how he manages disk space is weird. Otherwise, it is a nice development of a story that could have as well been the topic of a 30-minute Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits episode. A story about transfer of consciousness, a very trendy theme nowadays, see for example Transcendence or many episodes of the Black Mirror TV-series. But Replicas has the budget and actors to be well-done. The best thing about it is its third act: the movie spends two thirds of its time being predictable and giving fake hints of where it is going to end, only to go somewhere else and surprise us with, after all, a satisfactory ending.
Rating: 6 /10